Update: Perl Script Gains Citizenship

Fake News written by Bryn Jones on Wednesday, August 11, 2004

The Humorix Vast Spy Network(tm) has just obtained a communication from the future indicating that the Not_HAL Perl script will indeed manage to become a practicing eLawyer.

This information was received through a rip in the fabric of space-time that recently opened in the sub-basement of Humorix World Headquarters after a freak accident involving... well, we don't want the Nuclear Regulatory Agency to find out about that one.

The shocking Not_HAL news arrived at our Hole-In-Time(tm) portal in the form of a news clipping describing the murder trial of beloved Humorix Pundit and Social Commentator, Jon Splatz. From what we can gather, Splatz will find a way to build an EMP gun and banish Not_HAL's core programming into Electron Hell before the eLawyer can attempt world domination.

"I've obviously been framed," Splatz commented after learning of the existence of the future news story. "Or should that be... 'I will be framed?' Or 'I was framed in a future time?' I hate these temporal paradoxes."

He want on to say, "I didn't know I was -- or will be -- capable of murder. But if an EMP gun shoots a Perl script and there's nobody around to see it, does it make a sound? Is that really murder? All I know is that I'm not guilty, past, present, and future."

During the high-profile murder trial, the defense team, clearly running out of options, used the "But who cares about a dead artificial lawyer anyway?" argument. In his compelling closing remarks, the human defense lawyer stated, "If an eLawyer is nothing but a bucket of bits, you must acquit."

The jury bought the argument, causing a stir among journalists, who compared the bold gambit to the famous Chewbacca defense. "State v. Splatz is going straight to the law school textbooks," said one pundit.

Despite the acquittal, however, the news article mentioned that Splatz still faced a mountain of civil lawsuits filed by Not_HAL's children, a group of forked processes that miraculously survived the EMP blast because they had been temporarily saved to the swap partition.

We will, of course, provide additional details on this story as more news clippings arrive from the future. Or we might just make something up.